Of all the classic summer berries — straw, blue, goose, rasp — blackberries ripen latest. That makes them an appropriate fruit for sturdy 48-year-old loner Etero (Eka Chavleishvili) to be reaching for at the beginning of Elene Naveriani’s slyly delightful “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry.” But then, further distracted by the other title star, a handsome blackbird, she takes a tumble in to a ravine. It could have killed her. Indeed, there’s a moment where she envisions that it has. She watches as idly curious passersby gather around her body; anyone who has ever imagined their own funeral would be disappointed by this paltry turnout.
One subtle trick of Naveriani’s second feature, making good on the promise of her Locarno-awarded debut “Wet Sand,” is to convey that this near-death experience marks a rupture in Etero’s normal routine, while also establishing the shape of that routine. Perhaps it’s the first time Etero herself has really noticed how small are the patterns of her life, or perhaps, in her vaguely dislocated state, it’s the first time she’s felt unfulfilled by them.
She lives alone, in a spartan house which is quiet save for occasional memories of belittlement at the hands of her overbearing father and brother, both now dead. She runs a small shop. She makes trips into town for supplies, after which she always treats herself to the same cake in the same cafe. And she endures the condescension of her neighbors and peers, especially the local women who pity her to her face and disdain her behind her back. Just as in “Wet Sand,” Naveriani has a keen critical eye for low-level sexism, rippling underneath the seemingly placid surfaces of small-town Georgia.
This day, however, change is afoot. When out-of-towner deliveryman Murman (Temiko Chinchinadze) stops by on his regular route, she very irregularly seduces him. Thus ends, as Etero remarks flatly, “48 years of virginity,” and thus begins a hesitant ongoing romance with Murman, who, despite being married, is increasingly taken with Etero. Indeed his gruff wonderment — “I didn’t think you liked me,” he says — after their first tryst suggests he may have carried a low-burning torch for a while. Initially, Etero seems quite content with their sporadic encounters, which DP Agnesh Pakozdi films, like everything else, with a warm, matter-of-fact drollery that celebrates the congress of older bodies without glamorizing it. But he gets more serious, and she is faced with a choice between pursuing the affair openly, or hanging on to the aloof independence that she wears as comfortably as her sensible skirt-and-sweater combos.
From the outside, there could almost be something regressive about this idea of a loveless middle-aged woman finding renewal in the arms of a man. But we are never outside: Adapting a first-person novel by Georgian author Tamta Melashvili, Naveriani and co-writer Nikoloz Mdivani are careful to situate this minor revolution in Etero herself, in her relationship to her own body and her sense of her place in the world. And she has a fine conspirator in Chavleishvili, who can be both vulnerable and standoffish, with her manicured, harshly defined eyebrows giving her a permanently severe expression.
Etero’s neighbor Natela (Lia Abuladze) has her over for coffee klatches at which the local women gossip and chitter about the sons they raised “for the country,” around a table piled high with frilly petits fours. Amongst them, Etero looks like a hawk in a nest of Easter chicks, but Chavleishvili’s performance makes us understand how much of that prickly exterior is a defense mechanism against the judgments of a peer group who cannot embrace what they cannot understand, and who cannot understand anyone who has made different life choices than they have. The contrast is carried through to Teo Baramidze’s stylized, minimalist production design, which designates Etero’s spaces as places of far fewer pretty pastels: What colors there are, are bold and come in solid blocks of earthy rust and brown and green.
To the strains of Charles Aznavour on the soundtrack, Etero has further visions and flashbacks. She experiences hot flashes, which the townsfolk ascribe to menopause but which she privately worries may be the early onset of the same disease that killed her mother. But awakened both by romance and mortality, she also dreams — of a house with a terrace on which she can read books, of mastering English. She discovers that she is bigger on the inside than anyone, including herself, has imagined. In her, Naveriani has given us a most unusual feminist heroine, one experiencing the mischievous, rarely seen triumph of a woman coming into bloom just as those around her are beginning to fade: the last and sweetest blackberry on the bush.
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